I'll try to breeze through this fairly quickly. I know that I stand between you and dinner, and you've been working hard.
I really welcome the opportunity to present my views on what is a very comprehensive, omnibus piece of legislation. Because of its nature, I think it doesn't lend itself to sweeping judgments about being either good or bad, and there'll be lots of disagreement over which are the good parts and which are the bad parts.
I have been working on accountability, privacy, access, deputy ministerial accountability, and so on, for years and years, both as an academic and as a consultant to government. I've tried to offer a range of views on a number of topics that flow out of Bill C-2.
I start with the point that the centre of accountability in a democratic system has to be Parliament. I deliver something of a sermon to parliamentarians, insisting that they need to adopt a more positive, constructive approach to the enforcement of accountability. Principally, they have to look to ministers to answer for things that go wrong within government, and senior public servants should be answerable only indirectly and only under specific, narrowly defined circumstances.
Too much of Parliament, it seems to me, is about playing the “gotcha” game of accountability. Particularly in relation to scrutiny of the public service, the performance of departments, and the performance of programs, as I said, we need to adopt more of a learning approach and less of a blaming approach.